The Real Blogger Status

Last week, Blogger Engineering announced their latest feature, "Featured Post" . Whether you’d like to re-share that delicious holiday recipe from a few years back, spotlight a can’t-miss promotion you’re running, or just revive something quirky from the archives, the Featured Post gadget is a simple way to show off the content that matters most. This is a quick and easy way to highlight a specific post in your blog, that will be enjoyable or useful for your readers. I hope to use mine to provide useful advice, as "Read, and Learn" - once the Followers gadget has been updated , and is fully operational.

I've been seeing the Pinterest "Pin It" hover icons, in various blogs, for a few weeks. Today I decided to try adding an icon to this blog. I spent more time reading the instructions, then installing the icon.

A few folks have asked me about my social media toolbar, that I added a couple months ago. It took very little work, to develop and install this gadget. I just went to the AddThis website , registered, selected the options, and got the code. Then, I added one more HTML gadget, to my blogs.

One of the simplest - and most user friendly - displays that you can add, to your blog, is a custom "404 Not Found" display. A standard Blogger blog, by default, provides a terse advice, for invalid URLs. Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist. Would it not be more user friendly, to use relevant slang, maybe. Sorry, bro - that's not on! You can do this - and more - with a little imagination.

This week, I added a gadget that's been needed, on this blog, for some time. You may see my new "Top" button, at the lower right corner of this blog. If you have a normally wide browser window, with wallpaper showing on either side of the posts / sidebar section, you'll see the new gadget floating on top of the wallpaper. If you have squeezed your browser window to save horizontal space, you may see the new gadget floating on top of the sidebar (but beneath the sidebar gadgets).

When it comes to encouraging visits to your blog, by people who need help, a properly presented "Contact" form is a very useful feature. Some time ago, I used a comment form, and a specially written post, " Contact Me " (titled "Leave Comments Here"), to provide private contact . For this blog, with comment moderation before publishing, I simply read the unpublished comments published against my post "Contact Me", without publishing them. Time moved on, however - and various changes made by Blogger made my unpublished comments based contact form less useful.

Ever since Blogger (finally) gave us the option to add static pages to our blogs , blog owners started asking How do I make my pages URLs cleaner? The "/p/" in the URL is so messy looking. Our typical response would be simple. Sorry, you're stuck with the URL, as is, for a static page. And, that was that. Later, Blogger gave us the ability to redirect URLs within the blog - and that changed.

This blog started out using a Layout template, name "Minima". When I applied a Designer template, I selected the Designer equivalent of "Minima", name "Simple". Long ago, I picked a template background - which looked slightly better than boring - for this blog. The blog looked fairly decent with the content text floating over the background, when viewed using a high resolution, full colour ("32 bit" palette) display. Unfortunately, not everybody who views this blog uses a high resolution, 32 bit colour palette. During the past couple years, I have observed various comments published here, from people who did not find it easy reading the text, floating over the naked blog background.

Even before Blogger added static pages as a blog feature , blog owners have been asking how to make hidden or separate pages for their blogs. When static pages, and the Pages index gadget, were added, people started asking about indexing label searches and external links in the Pages gadget. There are several solutions to the need to have a Pages gadget that indexes archive / label searches, and external URLs. Each solution has its advantages, and disadvantages.

The articles in this blog, which discusses production and use of Blogger blogs , are written as posts. The various posts are combined, using embedded links , in different ways. Each new post appears on the main page, as it is written - and the various posts, appearing together on the main page, create opportunities for confusion, with the readers of the blog. Long ago, the task of moderating comments was rather depressing to me, as the focus of many of the comments made me think that nobody was actually reading the articles. Maybe, I would write an interesting post about URL availability ; but when moderating comments, I would find questions about posting comments on static pages . Or maybe a post about dynamic template concepts would attract complaints about referer spam . Why should I publish my advice, if nobody cares enough to read the articles and comment relevantly?

With Following becoming increasingly important in many blogs, as part of creating an exciting and ongoing community, many blog owners are using improved versions of the Followers gadget. Repositioning the Followers gadget, outside the sidebar, will let you show more Followers - or you can show the same amount of icons, but larger ones, in a gadget with the same height. If you want to encourage more Followers, using larger icons wouldn't hurt. All that you need to do is publish the Followers gadget as a static page, using the Pages Editor, in "Edit HTML" mode. You can display Followers in a separate page, without having to edit the template . Or, you can use an HTML / JavaScript gadget, instead of the default Followers gadget.

When it comes to encouraging repeated visits to your blog, by people who are interested in its content, a properly constructed labels array is a very useful feature. Unfortunately, a blog of any substantial size, and fully using the potential of labels, is going to have a rather large labels array - and this blog is no exception to that rule. Long ago, I realised that indexing the label searches in this blog was making my sidebar unacceptably long. Repeat visitors to this blog have complained occasionally, because I removed the labels index from the sidebar, to try and speed up the display load time. This week, I remedied that situation, by making my labels index gadget display as part of a static page, and moved the gadget from the sidebar to the main part of the blog.

Some time ago, I wrote how to make a static home page, where the key element was an HTML gadget, tweaked to display only with the home page of the blog . That's a useful tweak - and it's a tweak that can be used in various other conditional displays also. If you know a little template XML code, you can construct alternate conditional statements, and have template objects display in any of several other specific conditions.

Many bloggers want something better than the standard Blogger provided gadgets, like "Profile" / "About Us", on their blogs. For some, even a custom HTML / Rich Text gadget still doesn't provide enough choices. Rich text is too confusing. The HTML Gadget toolbar lacks features. There's no way to upload a picture.

Most of us, when we setup a blog, we just write the posts, and maybe add an Archives Index gadget in the sidebar. If we want to get fancy, we can use labels, and have a Labels Index in the sidebar. You may want to make your blog look like a web site , with the new Blogger static pages editor , and an index at the top of the blog. That's not a difficult thing to do, it just takes ingenuity. Note as in many of my posts, all example code here is presented with lots of gratuitous line breaks .

I speak and write English (Americanised English, for you Brits). Until this weekend, my blogs were all published in English, and in English only. Thanks to the Kaspersky fiasco of Friday (Kaspersky is a Russian product), however, I was motivated to correct that shortcoming. This was, surprisingly, an easier task than I had anticipated. If you will examine the sidebar of my recipe blog , you will observe my multi-lingual translator, courtesy of Google Translator.

Many people have asked how they can have a Welcome or Index page in their blog. I have a Welcome page, on PChuck's Network , or on this blog , for instance. The most obvious way to do this is to set the post date far into the future, so it always displays above any other posts, including ones which you may make in the future. This is, fortunately, not hard to do. You can change the post date on any blog post , any time you feel the need.